[skillpass]

I'm sorry about your experience. I do wish your wife would have received better care, but I'm not sure we can jump to the conclusion that the experience you had implies mandates and restrictions upon society are worthwhile.

Do you know that it would have been a shorter wait time during a period where the hospital wasn't overwhelmed? If so, how much shorter? Perhaps the medical staff were able to tell the signs of ectopic pregnancy in a way that allowed them put your wife lower on the triage priority list than you thought she should have been.

Does your area have any sort of restrictions? If not, how would the amount of time you had to wait be changed in a world where your area did have restrictions?

Even if you can show some benefit from the restrictions, are the benefits great enough to be worthwhile given the costs?

[amluto]

Restrictions would likely achieve essentially nothing right now. Reducing R from insane to merely very high might slightly flatten the curve, but not likely enough to make much difference. Restrictions on a level like China are a different story, but that’s not about to happen here.

Vaccines are entirely different story. They seem to have little effect on transmission (maybe enough to be useful after three doses but maybe not), but they seem to substantially reduce the number of people who end up hospitalized. So more vaccines would lower the curve, not flatten it.

(Take this with a grain of salt. Great data on vaccine efficacy in the US is a bit hard to come by, and I haven’t run the numbers.)